After a couple weeks of motel hopping in Fresno, it was almost Thanksgiving time. My friend there had plans out of town, and although I could have scrounged up a local invite, I decided to treat myself by booking the entire weekend at the Super 8 in Bakersfield on Real Road just off Route 99.
This may not sound like anybody else's idea of a vacation, but I had been looking forward to it for quite a while, for one simple fact: it the only motel I had found in California west of the Sierra that carried my favorite cable tv channel.
Anybody who has read my blog for a while, especially in the posts from a few years back when I was primarily writing movie reviews, probably knows which channel I am talking about---Turner Classic Movies, or TCM for short.
I've written about my love for TCM in the past, so I won't rehash it. Suffice it to say for now that whenever I check into a motel, one of the first things I do is flip on the television and check to see if they have TCM. It's always a nice buzz when I find out that they carry it.
In traveling across the country, I'd come to expect to find TCM on the channel menu roughly fifty percent of the time. I often remember a place by the particular movie I watched on TCM there. For example, the Twin Owls Motel in Estes Park, Colorado is linked in my mind with the Hepburn version of Little Women (too bad the wi-fi at the Twin Owls was unacceptably poor, available only in the lobby!).
But in California, I've hit an extreme dry spell, as far as TCM goes. After Burning Man, I had TCM in the Days Inn in Reno, but not in the Cal-Neva or the Three Peaks Lodge in Lake Tahoe. Then I had it again in Bishop, California at the Mountain View Motel, but not of course at the Motel 6 in Ridgecrest. I say "of course" because Motel 6 has a standardized basic cable package nationwide that never includes TCM.
Then I stayed at the aforementioned Super 8 in Bakersfield, but after that---zilch. None of the places I have stayed in the rest of my stay since then carried it. It hasn't mattered what cable package they have, whether something local, Direct TV, or Dish Network.
This includes the thirteen different motels in Fresno where I stayed, constantly changing and hoping for better luck. So on that score, I've yet to find my perfect Fresno motel.
It also includes all the motels in the Bay Area, Sonoma County, the North Coast, Modesto, Stockton, etc. When I splurged for a night at the Hampton Inn in Visalia, I was sure that they would have TCM, since the Hilton chain advertises an expanded cable lineup. They had over a hundred channels on their Dish Network package---but no TCM. After a while, I just gave up looking for it. And it certainly made me less likely to ever shell out for a Hilton again, if I'm going to wind up watching reruns of NCIS just like I do in a Motel 6.
But I knew I could always go back to Super 8 in Bakersfield if I wanted.
Or so I hoped. One never knows. I used to have the Super 8 in Westminster, Colorado as my standard overnight for the north Denver area, but upon my last stay, I found they had unsubscribed from TCM, despite the fact that the channel guide in the room still listed it, and the woman at the front desk swore that they still carried it. It seems that Comcast had switched TCM to a premium tier nationwide in all its cities, and so anyone carrying the basic package lost TCM.
The fact that the woman at the desk believed they still carried it is why one can't just call up and ask, most of the time. The front desk is often clueless and reports erroneous results. Most of them have never watched it, so they don't really know without actually turning on the television. Is that a sports network?
Fortunately when I checked back in for my second stay in Bakersfield, on the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, I found that my favorite channel was still on the menu. I wound up sitting down and relaxing on my bed just in time to catch the beginning of their airing of Gone With the Wind, which I hadn't watched in its entirety in many years. I sat glued watching the tv for the next four hours, leaving only during the intermission break that TCM carries, just like you would have in a real theater.
O.K., I suppose that far as life complaints go, the fact that I was so thankful to have TCM over Thanksgiving is a true First World Problem, as they say on the Internet. The fact that I can afford to obsess about this truly shows just how good my life is.
And that is something to be thankful about, isn't it?
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